Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt spent his childhood unable to breathe. The asthma was severe enough that his survival was not assumed, and what his family built around it was not sympathy but a regimen. He hiked in the Alps at ten and found that hard exertion made him feel well. After older boys manhandled him on a trip and he discovered he could not fight back, he took up boxing. By his twenties the invalid was gone, replaced by a man who called the result the strenuous life and prescribed it, loudly, to everyone else. Almost everything he did afterward was another test of whether the cure held.

The public career was enormous and is told in full elsewhere: the youngest man ever to take the office, at 42, after an assassin shot William McKinley. The trusts broken. The Forest Service and the first federal food and drug law. Some 230 million acres put beyond the reach of development. A Nobel Peace Prize for mediating a war between Russia and Japan. A third-party run in 1912 that split his own party and handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. BriefHistory covers that record and what it did to the country. This page is about what it cost the man who made it.

On February 12, 1884, his wife Alice gave birth to a daughter. Two days later, in the same house, his mother died of typhoid — and eleven hours after that, Alice died of the kidney disease her pregnancy had hidden. Roosevelt tore the pages about her out of his diary, burned nearly all their letters, and never discussed her with the daughter who carried her name. Then he went to the Dakota Badlands, where he had already sunk 14,000 dollars into cattle, and stayed until the winter of 1886 and 1887 killed the herd along with more than half the money. He came back east and went into politics.

His standing has since moved in two directions at once. The conservation record has hardened into the least contested thing any president left behind — the forests and monuments are simply there, and nobody argues for undoing them. The rest has not held up. The Roosevelt Corollary supplied a standing justification for intervening in Latin America, and what he wrote about race reads now as exactly what it was. In January 2022 the American Museum of Natural History took down the equestrian statue on its steps, where he sat mounted while a Native American man and an African man walked at his stirrups. It went to storage in North Dakota. The Rushmore face stayed.

Theodore Roosevelt's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Naval War of 1812 book
  Written at 23 and still cited 1882
• The Winning of the West book
  Four volumes — and the clearest record of his views on race 1889
• United States Forest Service company
  Created under Gifford Pinchot 1905
• Pure Food and Drug Act law
  The origin of the FDA 1906
• Antiquities Act designations law
  Used 18 times, beginning with Devils Tower 1906
• Through the Brazilian Wilderness book
  The Amazon expedition that nearly killed him 1914

• 1869 aged ~11 Hikes in the Alps and finds that exertion relieves the asthma
• October 27, 1880 aged 22 Marries Alice Hathaway Lee on his 22nd birthday
• February 14, 1884 aged 25 His mother and his wife die in the same house, eleven hours apart Typhoid and undiagnosed kidney disease. Their daughter was two days old.
• 1887 aged ~29 The Dakota winter kills the herd and half the investment He had put 14,000 dollars into cattle. The ranching life ended with the thaw.
• September 14, 1901 aged 42 Becomes president when McKinley dies of his wounds The youngest person ever to hold the office.
• 1906 aged ~48 Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War
• October 14, 1912 aged 53 Shot in the chest in Milwaukee and speaks for 90 minutes anyway The bullet passed through his eyeglass case and a folded 50-page speech before lodging in muscle.
• 1913 aged ~55 Sets out on a four-month Amazon expedition and nearly dies of tropical disease
• January 6, 1919 aged 60 Dies in his sleep at Sagamore Hill

• Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946
  First chief of the U.S. Forest Service and leading advocate of scientific conservation and managed public lands. appointed
• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. inspired by
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. prosecuted
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. read and acted on
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. distant cousin
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. niece